DeerFlow vs Dify

DeerFlow

A serious piece of agent infrastructure with a real company behind it and a permissive licence, aimed at tasks that run for hours rather than turns. Sandboxing, lease-based ownership and orphan recovery are the sort of details that only appear once someone has run this in production. What it is not is a product you can buy: the hosted workspace is a demo, so the practical path is self-hosting and paying your own model bills.

Pros

• +MIT-licensed and published under ByteDance's GitHub organisation
• +Each agent runs in a Docker sandbox with shell, browser, file system and VSCode Server access
• +Progressive skill loading from a built-in library or your own skill files
• +Model-agnostic: Doubao, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Gemini and external ACP agents
• +Handles the hard operational cases - lease takeover, orphan recovery and atomic cancellation

Cons

• −The hosted workspace is demo mode only, with features disabled and no plan to buy
• −Self-hosting means running Docker infrastructure and paying model costs yourself
• −No published SLA, support contract or commercial offering
• −ByteDance ownership is a procurement problem in some jurisdictions

Dify

Dify is the pragmatic choice when a team wants a visual builder for agents and retrieval that it can self-host today and hand to non-engineers tomorrow; the Community Edition is real software, not a demo, and the 158K GitHub stars reflect that. Pay for Cloud only if you do not want to run Docker — the $59 Professional tier is one workspace with three seats and metered message credits, so a developer team will outgrow it or self-host. It is less suited to teams that want code-first pipelines or a single-vendor model stack.

Pros

• +Open-source Community Edition with single-command Docker deployment and an active repository
• +One canvas covers workflows, agents and a knowledge pipeline with retrieval testing
• +Apps publish as API endpoints, embeds or MCP tools with logs and feedback built in
• +Plugin marketplace for model providers, tools, data sources and MCP integrations
• +Self-hosted and cloud editions share the same product, so you can move between them

Cons

• −Cloud tiers meter message credits, members and storage per workspace, and annual billing is the headline
• −The open-source licence carries commercial conditions (multi-tenant and logo clauses) rather than plain Apache
• −Visual workflows get hard to review and version once they grow past a few dozen nodes
• −Enterprise features such as SSO, RBAC and audit logs are reserved for the paid Enterprise edition

Is DeerFlow cheaper than Dify?

DeerFlow is free to use; Dify starts at $59/mo.

Does DeerFlow or Dify have a free tier?

Both: DeerFlow is free to use, and Dify has a free tier.

Which has a public API, DeerFlow or Dify?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.